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Comment by goosedragons | Hacker News Reader

macOS has the same sleep issues where sometimes it just doesn't. If you get a PC laptop that still supports S3 sleep in the BIOS it works fine. HiDPI support is a tradeoff. Windows can run into blurry apps but it works better on non 200ish PPI displays.

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My M2 Macbook Air has been flawless about sleep, but I set "Wake for network access" to "Never" so maybe I'm just avoiding Apple's issues there. At least it can be disabled; with Windows Modern Standby it was impossible to completely prevent wakeup last I checked. And new laptops are dropping support for S3 sleep.

As for the HiDPI stuff, it's one example among many of Apple making sure basic functions work without friction. I don't even know what I traded off for that - my Macbook works with normal PPI screens just fine - but it was worth it. For another example, I recently had trouble pairing a bluetooth keyboard on Windows 11 because their new settings panel is missing functionality. In 2023, that is an absolutely wild issue to have.

For HiDPI because of the way Apple handles it something like a 27" 4K display (really the sweet spot of sharpness and price right now) will either have to be run at "Looks like 1080p" (which is huge at 27"), tiny native 4K or some non-integer scale leading to overall blurriness and problems from that (different thickness lines). To have it look really good you need a ~200ish PPI display which at 27" means 5K and all the added expense of that. It's not as big of a problem anymore but on lower end Intel Mac GPUs like the 2018 Mac Mini scaling a 4K display to "Look like 1440p" takes more than the GPU can really muster and animations lag horribly and drop frames all over the place. Windows does fractional scaling correctly, a straight line is a straight line, fonts are sharper and rendering 4K is always rendering 4K and not 5K taxing a crappy GPU. And sometimes you have to use a 3rd party app to even enable Apple's HiDPI support on some displays because for whatever reason Apple hasn't blessed it.

Apple also removed sub-pixel rendering in 10.14 so on non-HiDPI displays text looks particularly bad compared to Windows or Linux. They also for some mind boggling reason don't support volume control over HDMI/DP with most monitors which is infuriating.

And the fact you need to spend $2000+ to get a laptop from them that can handle 2+ external monitors is NUTS.

What issue did you have pairing a Bluetooth keyboard in Windows 11? I've done that and had no issues even with ones that want me to enter a pairing code.

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